Fragments and Texts on Racket Theory

Texts by Max Horkheimer | Translated and edited by James Crane


Fragments

On the Ideology of Politics Today (ca. 1942)

Today the professors of economics proclaim: economics is no more.1 What they once called economics was connected to the free market, and this is on the wane, even where monopolists, for the time being at any rate, still regulate it more through arrangements and the acquiescence of parliaments than through fascist Commissars. What was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism—namely, that the words ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ concealed the true cause of economic processes—has now dawned on them as well, for a simple reason. Whereas in earlier times, those concepts directly stood in for wealth management, profiteering, and exploitation, today the state, with which its sponsors are not in complete agreement for the time being, is recognized as the mediator between these factors and fluctuations in supply and demand. Now, just as the government has been found behind the veil of economics [ökonomischen Schleier] instead of naked relations of exploitation, economists declare the laws of the market have been replaced by historical, political, and psychological laws instead. They’ve taken this into account in actuality as well. The progressives and reformists among them move on to the late-democratic administrations which, on the grounds of the incompatibility of capitalism and concrete democracy, are increasingly isolated, increasingly powerless bureaucracies and, ultimately, replaced by ruling agencies [Herrschaftsinstanzen] more adequate to monopoly. The more fortunate majority of economic experts, even when they collaborate with wartime administrations, hold themselves back in reserve until the bright capitalist sun breaks through the clouds once more.

However, the concept of economy they have declared obsolete is now more real than ever before. They were already disavowing it when there were still openings for professorships in economic theory. Only, in those days it was not done by liquidation of the word itself, but by its false substitution with so-called ‘national economy.’ Instead of getting to the bottom of the mode by which society produces and reproduces its material life, they investigated price-formation, economic cycles, and fluctuations of the stock market in a vacuum. Even then, out of embarrassment, they dismissed any considerations of the data which might bring out the connection between the transactions of the entrepreneur to actual power-relations as ‘extra-economic’; now, all of a sudden, the ultimate cause [die Endursache] is supposed to be the real confrontation between state power and national and international factors. But just as ‘national economy’ once veiled economic reality by hypostasizing market processes, now the increase of concentration on politics—or, at best, on technology—effectively prevents cognition of the facts of the matter. This is the regression of bourgeois theory to its early stages, to Cardano and Machiavelli. The regression, however, is not the repetition but the distortion of the original state of affairs. [The rediscovery of politics, which in the Renaissance was a theoretical advance, has become in thinking under monopoly a category more ideological than the laws of the market were under liberalism: with its help, the surface is hypostasized. The dominated masses attribute world events to politics—hearing only appeal and degree, keeping themselves informed about the lives of the high and mighty, facts which need no theory. The masses experience the immediate consequences of political acts, of negotiations of rackets; they feel the effects of the emergency assistance, the inflation, the new job, the war and take big politics for fate and nature just as they once did the economic depression. And each of the protagonists shares in this belief: they know they hold a key position. Just as the entrepreneur confused his business ventures undertaken on the basis of economic cycles, his calculations and his speculations, with freedom, the presidents of trade unions and governments mistake their decisions for initiation of causal chains.2 Governing, however, must defer to the same necessities as asset management: to the requirements of the reproduction of society in the form of power relations as they are. In this, there is little difference between the two periods. The unsurveyability of the market from which the self-deception of freedom arose had only expressed the fact that the relationships between entrepreneurs amongst themselves were not rational, but relationships of individual self-assertion. Today the struggles take place in much stronger groups, amongst the movements of the most concentrated masses of capital. The governments are executive apparatuses which cannot rationally penetrate the current balance of forces on which they depend, but feel their effects concretely.] They would be free, if…3

Rackets and Spirit (1942/44)

The basic form of domination is the racket.4 It is possible, as some have assumed, that a single tyrant directed and protected the whole of the primal horde, but even in this case the gradation of strength between him and the weakest member of the horde establishes a hierarchy.5 The next-strongest of the men guard their privileges over their lessers just as the patriarch guards his own over them. With the invention of tools, the order of rank is no longer determined by physical force alone, but just as much by the way of life prescribed to human beings by the nature of their tools. Better weapons, methods for cultivating the soil, in combination with a more suitable condition of the land, make a more abundant existence possible. Once a new stage is reached, regression into an earlier one is prevented not merely by new habits and needs in general, but also by the splitting of interests established on the basis of new methods. Unique requirements and the skills which correspond to them are formed and developed by certain individuals and groups, in opposition to the rest of society according to the positions they hold in the new division of labor. Through these abilities, the occupation of key positions in the social apparatus, the hierarchy of power, originally and exclusively grounded on natural potencies, undergoes modification until, in the course of social development, hierarchy ultimately corresponds to second, social nature—no longer to strength, but position. That first nature upon which society is grounded still is mutilated and enslaved.

The divorce of above from below, dominators from dominated, rests on the organization of each individual power-group in itself and its opposition to those below it. Towards the top, each group is relatively amorphous, since, in the long run, their form of organization is molded by the strenuous effort not to slide towards the bottom. Organizations with the tips of their spears pointed upwards have no place in the established hierarchy, are without regular economic function, and, after periods of illegality, are brought back to life in revolutionary actions. In history thus far, whenever such undertakings were victorious, groups of functionaries and their clients replaced them in the modified hierarchy and hardened themselves downwards. These groups maintain their social function or adopt a new one, which, from then on, they monopolize. ‘Hardening’ means monopolizing the advantages which can be extorted on the grounds of a determinate, regular performance within the social process. One such hardening of a function—which would prove decisive—was private ownership of the means of production, namely the command over commodity-production in the age of industrialization.

The most general category of group-executed functions is that of protection. Groups maintain the conditions for the continuation of the division of labor in which they have preferential standing, upholding their monopoly and warding off the changes which might endanger it. They are rackets. In each case, ‘ruling class’ means the structure of rackets on the grounds of a determinate mode of production, so far as they simultaneously protect and suppress the undermost strata. They may also be split amongst themselves according to the economic dynamics that shape their material interests; indeed, they may, consciously or unconsciously, perpetuate and even intensify the splitting so far as their protective functions are strengthened in the process. The relation of the ruling class to the unification of domination has always been a complicated one. The ambivalent relationship between the powers of empire and papacy in the joint suppression of centrifugal forces through the middle ages was more advantageous for each than the fusion of the two powers would have been. Even the maintenance of the nation-states only served a part of the special interests of the national bureaucracy, but to the benefit of the system of rackets as a whole.

The downwards-hardening of rackets is identical with the hardening of the individuals who constitute them, something which has been consciously pursued throughout the whole of history. For the sake of one’s own children, this is what their education consisted of. Only in the liberalistic periods, in which a certain sector of rackets couldn’t be totally devoid of more obliging qualities for economic reasons, did [education] take on humane features. Prior to this, [education] was as cruel as the initiation-rites of the primitive tribe, which was already a racket itself. For individuals who lacked a rightful claim on the grounds of their descent to be integrated into a racket, the procedure was not like the incorporation of the youth into their own tribe, but rather like their consecration into the elect racket of the sorcerers. This demands the complete breaking of one’s personality, absolutely binding guarantees of one’s future faithfulness. The individual must relinquish all power, burn all of their bridges behind them. The true Leviathan, the racket demands the unqualified acceptance of the social contract. A continuum of smooth transitions runs from the sacrifice one’s own mother, which the would-be mage must make as an offering to the racket of sorcerers, to the dissertations of the universities, through which the adept must prove their thinking, feeling, and speaking have irrevocably taken on the forms of the racket of the academy. In certain situations, the outsider’s capacity for achievement may make them an attractive prospect for the racket, but it never entitles them to being incorporated into it. Official legal titles [Rechtstitel] merely attest to membership in a racket; thereby, the state, signing on behalf of all, certifies that the holder belongs to a racket and is thus integrated into the system. Legal titles and illegal titles, membership to the world and membership to the underworld, are distinguished by the fact that the world has at its disposal an all-embracing organization, a protection none shall escape; whoever is proscribed by its agencies is truly forsaken. Even during open conflicts between their umbrella organizations, one regards the individual with whom the other side had all-too serious difficulties with serious suspicion. It cannot be in any doubt that their defection from the one camp to the other is motivated by circumstances extraneous to their essential relation with it, not by their lack of adaptability to it. The Volscians welcomed the fugitive Coriolanus, whose affinity for domination shone far and wide, with open arms. After all, he was a man of the rackets of the gentiles and possessed the qualities of a field general, which are always a recommendation. The fugitive slave, however, is the symbol of the opposite.

When an organization is so powerful that it can enforce its will upon a geographical area as permanent rule over the conduct of all its inhabitants, the domination of persons takes the form of laws [Gesetze]. This fixes relative power-relations. As a fixed medium, law [Recht], like other mediations, acquires a nature and force of resistance all its own. In becoming a substantial element of spirit, it incorporates the harmony of universality and particularity as a necessary idea. The sense and purpose of the law [Recht], to serve as the guideline for social life, is conditional upon its disregard for the determinate person and for their past, its validity for and against each and all under its remit until it is openly repealed. The means of domination oppose it as the reflection by which it unmasks itself. Increasingly closed off to those below, with the consolidation of monopoly, the totalitarian shape of society wages war against the law [Recht], against all mediations which have acquired a life of their own and existence in the forms of language. The fundamental illegality of the racket stands opposed to the spirit, even where the racket is not only legal, but stands behind the laws themselves. For as long as legality has existed, it has borne the features of illegality. The racket knows no mercy to life outside itself, but only the law of self-preservation. Under monopoly, language petrifies into a system of signs, more mute and expressionless than morse-code and the tapping-systems of prisoners. Language loses its sense of expression completely. It becomes a mechanism in production, like levers or wires, machinery for the calculations of administration, the embodiment of techniques of suggestion. The spiritual intercourse of individuals is reduced to the display and detection of identification tags. Speech either proves the speaker dependable enough for the rackets or betrays them as the conspirator who flashes the tip of their dagger. Petrified language points in accusation towards heaven like bare tree stumps on abandoned battlefields: it denounces the world of rackets it must yet serve. The mother-bomb launched from its airplane discharges twenty smaller bombs, tearing the fruit of mothers to shreds not once but twenty times over, stands accused for its hellish vocation precisely by the name ‘mother’ under which it has been advertised. The dead woods of words of our era will still bear witness against it after it has passed.

Every racket conspires against the spirit; all conspire against and among one another. The reconciliation of universal and particular is immanent to the spirit; the racket is their irreconcilable opposition, though concealed behind ideas of unity and community. The evil is not domination in itself, but the final hardening of domination that defines the racket. From the whispering of the council of the elders in the primitive tribe to the understanding reached between industry and army in private clubs and boardrooms, domination provides the historical documentation of its bad consciences. The brutality of the underclasses, from which the secret of the ruling must be kept, is nothing original, but socially generated. The terrible, bloodthirsty ‘Collective’ that traverses the history of humanity is but the other face of the exclusionary rackets, consciously or unconsciously generated by them. The worn-out costumes of the aristocrats live on as ethnic dress [Volkstrachten], the rackets of the ruling class as the brutality of the stronger towards the weaker, as the indescribable viciousness of the mob towards the powerless. This is the racket of the little man, degenerated cultural heritage. The rackets have always pointed to the fearsomeness of the collectives they generate and direct as the ground of their own necessity, and the unholy naivete of the historian has accordingly mistaken the disfigured grimace of the masses for bare nature. To date, the racket has impressed its stamp on all social appearances; it has ruled as racket of the clergy, the court, the propertied, the race, the men, the adults, the family, the police, the criminal—and within these media themselves, in the form of individual rackets over the rest of their sphere. Everywhere it has set up the opposition between inner and outer; the man who belonged to no racket was outside in a radical sense—he was forsaken. Even in the heads of the isolated [Vereinzelten], rackets still ruled by means of their concepts and the schemata of judgment, the mode and content of thinking stemming from their world. To break through the boundary between inside and outside is the goal of politics, which, if fulfilled, would transform the world. In the true idea of democracy—which even now leads a repressed, subterranean existence among the masses—an intimation of a society free of the racket has never completely died out. To unfold this idea would mean breaking through the ticket of suggestion which still presses the true critique of the racket into its service [… and even now prepares to spread the fascist dictatorship of the industrial monopolies across the surface of the earth under the guise of an attack on the weakened rackets of finance capital.]6

History of the American Labor Force (1942/44)

The historical course of the proletariat led to a crossroads: it could become a class or a racket.7 Racket meant privileges within national borders, class meant world revolution. The leaders have relieved the proletariat of this decision.

On the Philosophy of Law (1942/44)

It has been said that punishment arose from revenge.8 Society removes such business from the hands of the injured party. Judiciary [Justiz] is an early state monopoly, administered by the authoritative rackets. The separation of powers—of the making, applying, and executing of laws [Gesetze]—then arose as a protective measure for the citizens [Bürger] against the executive. They wanted to get the bureaucracy under control, to limit its arbitrariness, according to their interests. With the concentration of their class today, the need for the division of powers disappears; new rackets unite the powers in their hands, and the idea of universality wanes with the waxing of corruption of parliaments.

Since the replacement of revenge by the state—which constitutes the state as its ground, whether it arises through internal development or conquest—there have been many theories of punishment as far as the citizens of the state [Staatsbürger] were concerned; to the slaves and serfs, it was an admitted means of terror. Punishment is rationalized as retribution, restoration, deterrence, protection, and education. Without punishment, society cannot exist, and this sign of its weakness is simultaneously its mark of shame, branding it as the very nature above which it seeks to rise.

All of their theories dissolve—that is, in execution. However reasonable their ground for inflicting pain may be, the pain is senseless. Contra medicine, the purpose of punishment is pain. Pain is not the undesired but desired effect of each and every punitive measure. The achievement of its moral purpose, with which it may excuse itself, is questionable and immoral. The power that methodically turns pain against the powerless turns it into means of its own dark ends, hidden behind morality. The enemy is never the object of punishment, for it is always administered to the defenseless. Clearer than through any other institution, it is through punishment society shows it represents not universality but particularity, even if it were that of the majority, excepting only the one who is punished. Every human being could attain universality through insight; there would be no need for pain. Recourse to pain is the confession of the illegality of law [der Illegalität des Rechts].

In class society, the particularity is quite pronounced. The laws [Gesetze] are set in pre-established harmony with the rule of cliques which hold weapons and means of production. Religion, especially protestantism, has taken it upon itself to support such domination through the emphasis on evil, through which it glorifies punishment. Before power, this anthropology points upwards with one finger and respectfully bows; before powerlessness, it justifies punishment as divine institution, like poverty and war. But even the overwhelming majority which must resort to punishment is still the false; whoever transfigures it commits idolatry, as did Luther, conscripting spirit in the service of domination to which the flesh is fettered out of fear and need. To the reality of misery, he added the lie that the states and rulers whose ravage fills history, whose ravage is history itself, has a sacred significance. Such a lie was unthinkable before the concept of spirit, which first entered into the world through Christianity and would surely transform it in turn. Such a lie pollutes the Christian centuries.

Solidarity (1942/1944)

Solidarity is grounded on shared knowledge.9 Due to the necessary inconclusivity of knowing, it seems solidarity is necessarily fleeting. The insights which once bound human beings to one another might prove incorrect. The ruptures in French schools of poetry and painting through the last century, the sworn enmity of friends over a principle, the factional splits between the smallest groups and groupuscules of the extreme left—in any event, these schisms do them more honor than the prudent coherence does psychoanalytic and political gangs.

On closer inspection, however, there are motives beyond the theoretical one at the root of those eternal feuds of the old Bohème. In negation of an earlier state of knowledge, it is not crossed out but overcome by determinate negation. The transition is demanded by the thing itself [die Sache selbst], it is inherent within it. The slackening of intellectual forces may keep the individual from carrying this out on their own. However, once this step has been taken by anyone, only the pettiest individual [individuelle] interests can determine the individual [Einzelnen] to defend the duller, more limited mode of thinking against the more precise, richer one. This is neither blind adherence nor mere fidelity, for the more primitive consciousness is always better off when taken up by a more differentiated consciousness than it is by itself. There are mechanical obstacles which stand like walls between the subject and historically adequate knowledge, such that the subject cannot perceive it, even if it exists. But this is why the old and the new are not of equal cognitive standing.

According to Marx’s insight, proletarian class interest should not simply oppose the bourgeois, but objectively be the higher. The power of the insight [Einsichtigkeit] into this objectivity facilitated the defection of the sons of the bourgeoisie over to the side of the struggling workers. The reverse path, from the proletarian to the bourgeoise, was betrayal—betrayal of truth, as much as it was for the remaining bourgeoisie to remain in an ideology which had long since become transparent as such. They were not cut off from knowledge by social fact, but by the obstinate narrowing of their own horizons for private advantage. For so long they were resolved to disclaim, to turn away from what they hypocritically cried out were the highest of values—religion and truth, love of humanity and justice—until they had become too stupid for private advantage itself and are now, for all their pedantic cleverness, rightly reduced to nothing.

Considerations for career tempered the disputes of the Bohème. Whatever in solidarity is threatened by the process of knowing is that which is still impure and bad in it. Not a few communities have fallen apart without solidarity being extinguished. Every once in a while, it was picked up by a single one abandoned by all.

A Theory of the Criminal (1943/1944)

The more fragmented it was, the more mediated domination was.10 Individual property owners did not keep the poor down as the feudal lord and the oriental despot had with satraps and personal guards, the simple continuation of barbaric-physical violence; their will had to be objectified in law, and so limit the totality of the power it represents. Law [Gesetz] as means of domination develops a logic of its own, an opposition to domination which cannot be overcome by sending out silk thread. Whoever offends in bourgeois society is no longer taboo like the transgressor of primitive solidarity, no longer the rebellious slave or serf. The offender does not merely stand outside their society, but is rather the exponent of a conflict which resides within that society itself. The social principle to which the law owes its existence is reproduced in the criminal. Even through the religious hymn to the worldly sword of the executioner [Richtschwert] of which Protestantism sang, the human-inhuman origin of law [Recht] shines through, the will of the minority giving itself the form of the majority. The many lords who, though in competition with one another, sought to control the authorities, had to grant a kind of autonomy not only for their own economic command but also to the protection against the competing, executive organs of terror, so they took up the law. Criminal law protects the citizen not only from the crime, but also from the state supposed to avenge it. The perpetrator, the outsider, is still thought of as an individual. Bourgeois criminal law goes back to the civil law of the primitives rather than the measures against the transgressors, so far as one can speak of such a law at all. Positive law, “governing all the phases of tribal life,” says Malinowski, “consists… of a body of binding obligations, regarded as a right by one party and acknowledged as a duty by the other, kept in force by a specific mechanism of reciprocity and publicity inherent in the structure of their society. … Their stringency is ensured through the rational appreciation of cause and effect by the natives, combined with a number of social and personal sentiments… .”11 The formulation of principles and laws belongs to exchange. It is connected with the consolidation of private property,12 which, ultimately, makes human beings into subjects. The market comes by its opposite honestly; the market, like money, demands the law. There is an affinity between the two media of the economy [viz., law and money]. They are universal in form: one cannot tell from the law itself where it will have effect, nor from money where it comes—although in actuality, one is drawn to the poor, the other to the rich. Precisely the neutrality of the media, their formal universality, determines the member of the bourgeois world as subject, which is the same in all. These [media] first create the concept of the human being. Personality has at least rudimentary legal relations [Rechtsverhältnisse], a universal for its presupposition. The criminal counts on such universality. So far as his ratio extends, he grabs hold of the chances that flow his way from the anonymity of the means which make him equal as well. The accursed, godforsaken, the poor sinner, affront to gods and men, is the violator of the articles of the law; the criminal, a product of humanity.

The deception—as if among the bourgeois there were criminals other than the perpetrators of crimes against property—is ideology in the truest sense: illusory semblance to which individuals are necessarily subject given their role in the social process. Murder is certainly no longer punished less than theft, as in periods of scarcity of goods and labor. Since the Lord said vengeance is mine, the state has monopolized the system of vengeance, to which the individual is held to account whether they commit sacrilege, sexual murder, embezzlement, or theft. The business of the state requires uniform guidelines. Even juridical concepts are subject to leveling. Their opposition to one another is erased as every violation is measured by the same measure according to a common denominator of punishment. This reduction was accomplished according to the schema of property. The category of the commodity has taken hold of all branches of human intercourse to the effect that even life and limb are understood, attacked, or kept under guard according to the model of property. Everything within reach of human beings becomes something at someone’s disposal, an object of the legal subject [Gegenstand des Rechtssubjekts]. The law [das Recht] was even involved in the constitution of the body itself. Just as each logical classification points back to painful separations in actuality, so too do the parts of the body point back to the oldest proprietary rights [Rechtsschutz]. Any injury to the Lord and to his ‘hands’ [Gesindes]13 had a price corresponding to the impairment [Beeinträchtigung] resulting from the loss. The hand was dearer than the ear. The parts of the body [Körperteile] belong to the body, and the body belongs to the person. The state protected its ‘member’14 as the owner of his body [Leibes], and under such protection [Schutz] the individual formed as the embodiment of the psychological. Proprietary right over the body is a special case of the protection of private property. The bloom of criminal law coincides with those times in which the central state identified its internal peace with the security of property.

In the concept of the criminal, bourgeois society reassures itself that it knows how to unify universal and particular interest, for only so far as it guarantees self-preservation to each can it condemn by [its] reason what it prosecutes by [its] particularism. The theoretical concept of the crime cannot be separated from the construction of the state contract by which it obliges people into obedience to the state, given that they, for the sake of their own well-being, transferred the highest of powers over to it. “But by safety must be understood,” Hobbes writes, “not the sole preservation of life in what condition soever, but in order to its happiness. For to this end did men freely assemble themselves, and institute a government, that they might, as much as their human condition would afford, live delightfully.”15 Once the state contract is in effect, the criminal is in breach of his own pragmatic reason which confronts him as objective in the state. This defines the criminal in distinction from the evildoer. For bourgeois thinking, there is no sin but that against the principle of the self. The criminal violates consistent, organized self-preservation for the sake of the limited, anarchic. His prudence [Klugheit] comes up short. He is incapable of waiting. He is all-calculating yet wants for calculating intelligence. He is punished for his folly. Any other theory of punishment betrays society’s doubts about its own rationality. The concepts of state contract and reason are equivalent for the bourgeoisie. Society regards itself as concrete reason, the union of the rational who would protect themselves from nature in common. Towards those who do not pay for their incorporation with strict obedience, society itself administers the destructive force of nature, the very same from which society had provided them escape; society becomes a premeditated, systematic force of nature in comparison to which the unmediated force of nature, for all its cruelty, still appears the truer state of innocence.

The stigma of the criminal is uselessness. He skips over the stage of production and seeks to appropriate as much circulating surplus value as possible for himself. The industrialist, businessman, advertising agent, professor stick to circulation as well, but in the fulfillment of their contract. The criminal, however, represents on the inside what the war presents to the outside: the capture of surplus value under the elimination of exchange. Robber barons, condottiere, volunteer corps [Freischärler], racketeers vacillate between warrior and criminal. Whichever pole they are assigned is not up to them, but to the given state of domestic and foreign policy. Crime is the deed par excellence, appropriation without exchange. It forms the naive counterpart to the ownership of property [Besitz], which, much like itself, creates no goods, either as manual or intellectual labor, and yet exacts its tribute, whether squeezing it directly from the factory or indirectly through interests and dividends. This secret kinship with crime, the social affinity of the poles: the privileged and the condemned, provokes the proprietor to revenge. He has the entirety of the armed forces on his side; the criminal, at best, a machine gun. But property ownership, without which there would be no ego nor conscience, consciencelessly suffers not another blackmailer besides it. The life lived on one’s own terms without service to the system trespasses against the divine order of things. Criminals and capitalists are only out for profit; they are not interested in any work. The ‘joy of work’ is an ideology of large-scale industry in the period already in the process of the liquidation of the bankers and the sphere of circulation as a whole: a conceptual schema for the administration of human beings under monopoly. The capitalistic criminal wasn’t violent from the start. As a burgher, he preferred profit without bloodshed to military actions. He only resorted to war and state of siege when the existence of the class was thrown into question or there were surplus profits to be obtained. The career criminal feels much the same. “In the execution of the crime, a ‘good’ criminal avoids unnecessary cruelty and murder. The thing to aim at is ‘big money.’ The risk is equal whether you are stealing seven or seventy thousand dollars. ‘I don’t look to kill anybody. If I can prevent it, I will. But I would shoot somebody to get away, if there’s plenty of money there, say $100,000.’”16 The criminal represents the more irrational, more primitive racket in comparison to the state-protected class monopoly. His profession points back to early-bourgeois and pre-bourgeois forms of domination; these continue to thrive in the present as Mafia and Camorra, despised like overthrown deities become demonic powers for the new religion. Contemporary domination perpetuates itself in forms, however destructive to human beings they may ultimately prove, through which social life is reproduced at the same time. The criminal, on the other hand, too weak to punch above his weight with his contemporaries, apes domination which has already become obsolete. He has no part in the social reproduction of life to the end of its domination. To this extent, he is destructive.

Where bourgeois society confronts nature directly, production and destruction coincide. In the slaughterhouse, murder [Totschlag] is at one with the production of the means of life. But in the relation of the classes to one another, the functions are differentiated: the entrepreneur has command over production, the policeman hunts down the criminal. Violence is no less essential to the bourgeoisie than to those forms of society in which the sword and the whip were still in the hands of the master or of those in his immediate vicinity. Wherever one clan [Sippe] or class would reserve the possibility of a relatively secure life for itself while leaving the other to hunger, insecurity, and labor, it needs to maintain its hold upon the force to strike as well, whether in the shape of a club to repel strangers from entering one’s cave or the nightstick to murder prisoners in the cellar of the police precinct. Due to the division of labor, this force crystallizes into apparatuses of oppression on the reverse side of culture. In the penal system and the police, every instinct of destruction finds somewhere to hide. By contrast, the destruction brought about by crime is not assigned to it by the division of labor. It is merely a deduction from production. Despite Mandeville’s illuminating suggestions concerning the productivity of destruction in general, and the dependency of arts and trades on crime in particular17—which Marx complements with his own satirical apology for crime, in its significance for technology, economy, and culture18—it remains a mere ferment of reversion and dissolution. At best, the criminal becomes an honest bandit who murders for a fixed sum. He remains at this stage just as quack doctors and faith healers still linger at that of the alchemist in the transition to natural science. The criminal will not surrender his freedom nor pocket his winnings without becoming a member of the enterprise he succumbs to. He cannot make himself into a subject, no matter how hard he tries. Black Will, the cutthroat in Arden of Feversham,19 long before The Beggar’s Opera,20 already exhibits the ethos of the businessman [Ethos des Kaufmanns] who keeps the contract even when it proves unfavorable. “I have had ten pound to steal a dog, and we have no more here to kill a man; but that a bargain is a bargain, … .”21 His ideal is that of security for the branch of industry in which he is employed. “Ah, that I might be set a work thus through the year, and that murder would grow to an occupation, that a man might follow without danger of the law: – zounds, I warrant I should be warden of the company!”22 Will is a thwarted entrepreneur. But private murder was a poor line of work anyway; it was only the object of regular commerce as long as commerce itself was half-taboo. With the police, it is another matter entirely: henchmen and hangmen who share in the crookedness of the criminal and the brutality of his profession, but not in his autonomy. Though their licensed violence functions for the sake of money as well, they are not paid for services rendered, nor in spoils like Black will, but receive a wage. The policeman, the state prosecutor, and the judge bear no responsibility for the existence and content of their profession; they are essentially instruments, and only have power as such. They thus consider themselves to be of a third degree because they publicly accept wages for the first. If the criminal is the crippled, retarded twin brother of the bourgeois, the police agent is his authorized representative [Prokurist]. The principle in both is the same: violence, without which bourgeois property cannot exist.

In the deed of the criminal, however, the reversion into earlier stages of development is united with the most extreme consequence of progress: it negates taboos. In planning and execution, the criminal only takes the power of the law [Gesetz] and its servants into consideration, but not [power, not] the thing itself [die Sache]. The overcoming of fear before this thing was the way of the bourgeois spirit from the very beginning. After the dissolution of nature in things, however, which brought the evildoers to a halt, there is no reserve for it in humanity either. Humanity establishes its dominion without restriction. The radicality of this is revealed in crime. When bourgeois thinking set out to emancipate itself from shrinking back in terror, it shied away from nothing as crime. The result is that thinking and doing, each driven to their extreme, collapse into one another: the doing merely uncovers the powerlessness of things already realized for thinking. The content, the spirit of the thing, which the crime ignores, is the secret which, according to the enlightenment, does not exist at all. Thus the worship of blind violence out of desperation for rescue from the cycle of transgression and revenge, in which crime is mythical, is one with progress itself. The abstract self of the enlightenment, which can convert nature into propaganda because it is no longer arrested by any content within it, and only ever knows its own purposes, is in the crime shot through with the senselessness of totally objectified nature. It is the deed that shrinks back from nothing and yet remains the very shrinking of the primitive into whose soul no glimmer of rescue from the darkness of the cycle breaks: this is the deed that lights the way forward for the bourgeoisie on its path towards dynamic society.

Internal Memos

LA Memo (1942)

Memorandum. On parts of the Los Angeles work-program that cannot be carried out by the philosophers.

The total plan of the work relates to a comprehensive critique of present-day ideology.23 Ideology is to be understood not only as the consciousness, but also the constitution of human beings in the present phase, i.e., anthropology in the sense the concept is used in “Egoism and Freedom Movements.” Particular emphasis is to be placed on the connection of the practical, “realistic” spirit—as has found its philosophical expression in pragmatism—and fascism. It is, however, not the underlying thema probandum. The emancipatory features of enlightenment and pragmatism should be worked out just as much as the repressive. The attack on dominant ideology should consist in a critical analysis of both decisive spiritual-intellectual spheres and mass culture. The success of such analyses essentially depends on their orientation to concrete insights into the most recent economic developments; for the whole aims at overcoming political stagnation.

By no means is it to be thought of as a comprehensive presentation of the economic situation of the present and its theory. Rather, the economic parts should center on specific individual questions of great importance, all of which relate to the theory of classes.

In the following, we will identify the individual problems which lie particularly close to our hearts. It should be self-evident that these questions can be reformulated by the economists.,

  1. What has become of the proletariat in the monopolistic-fascistic phase? Can it still be defined today in the sense it was in Capital? What effect has monopolization had on the differentiations within the proletariat? To what extent do changes in differentiation mean changes in class-consciousness, or in the structure and role of the party?
  2. What has become of the capitalist class? To what extent is the capitalist class in accord with itself, nationally and internationally? Relation between trade, finance, manufacturing and heavy industry. Stage of the process of concentration. What changes has capitalist class-consciousness undergone, and how to the capitalists stand in their attitude towards dominant ideologies, e.g., individualism and collectivism?
  3. The question of the class character of bureaucracy. We should arrive at a clear consensus about the present controversy. For this, it is probably necessary to trace bureaucratization back to its various roots (professional civil service, joint stock company, etc.). Particular attention should be paid to the problem of the separation—or fusion—of property titles and the power of disposal. Weight should also be given to the influence of technical changes, to the transition from mediated to immediate domination. The factory is developing from a business enterprise to an institution with its own “form of life,” consciously created “community,” mythology of order, and hierarchy. The role of oversight for managers in the various spheres of culture.
  4. Does technological differentiation lead to greater convergence or divergence of the various types of work? The chances for democracy in the future depend on the answer to this question. The most recent publication of the CIO on “Industrial Democracy” (Reuttenberg and another author) seems to contradict the thesis of progressive divergence represented by Pollock and Neumann against Marcuse.
  5. How does academic and non-academic discussion today stand with respect to Marxian theory? It would be of the utmost importance to first conduct a survey of this discussion to subsequently work through in a critical manner. What is the position of trade union leadership towards Marxist and non-Marxist theory? Is there any serious effort being undertaken to develop Marxian economics further? What other important theorems should be seriously contemplated today?
  6. In relative separation from the above questions, there is the problem relating to the direct control of mass culture by monopoly. It would have the greatest significance for the project to have a clear notion of the mechanisms of control, economic and personal, through which each of the important spheres and the cultivation of the next generation are regulated. This is rather simple to establish in the case of film; the most important data is still to be compiled from other areas (radio, newspapers, magazines, universities, and scientific foundations). To this belongs the interconnections between individual sectors of the culture-industry. Perhaps Upton Sinclair, who studied a number of these questions at an earlier point in time, will be of use for these investigations. Furthermore, the literary-sociological side of the work, which has so far extended only to German and American biographies, ought to be expanded to other branches of popular literature and to the specific categories of such work as a whole.

In the following, we provide several suggestions which should be pursued further in future correspondence. Further areas for literary analysis come to mind: best sellers and the publications of book clubs; movie-magazines, especially those which report on the stars and their private lives; introductions to the drugstore editions of major literary works; program booklets for philharmonic concerts and other kinds of entertainment; analysis of advertisements.

Categories in connection with the big work:

Naturally, many of these aspects are already included within the biographical work. Others which have already arisen have here been deliberately omitted. The end goal would be to develop them on the basis of a unified theoretical context—namely, the tendency towards the unification of the world.

Notes for the Programme of the Book (8/30/1942)

Problem:

– – –

Chapter Two:

– – –

Third chapter: Models for rackets.

– – –

Pollock and Weil:

Example: Fox.

Grossmann:

Models for culture:


Notes


  1. Max Horkheimer “[Zur Ideologie der Politik heute (Fragment)]” in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, eds. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Suhrkamp, 1985), 316-318. Most likely drafted alongside the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Concept of Enlightenment.” ↩

  2. [Translator’s note:] Cf. Toni Kannisto (2018): “According to Kant, freedom is a “kind of causality” (A445/B473). It is the capacity to initiate causal chains of itself without prior grounds, independently of nature’s causal laws. Freedom is causality through concepts, determined by reason’s moral law.” “Freedom as a Kind of Causality.” Akten des 12. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses “Natur und Freiheit” in Wien vom 21.–25 (September 2015). [link] ↩

  3. Typescript breaks off. [Translator’s note:] The referent of “they” is left ambiguous—the masses, the forces, the governments, etc? ↩

  4. Max Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist (1942),” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 287-291. ↩

  5. [Tr. note:] Allusion to Freud’s reflections on the origin of exogamy in Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, tr. James Strachey (Routledge, 2001 [1950]), 139-146. [link]. ↩

  6. From Horkheimer’s typed manuscript; missing from Pollock’s. ↩

  7. Max Horkheimer “Geschichte der amerikanischen Arbeiterschaft,” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 260. ↩

  8. Max Horkheimer “Zur Rechtsphilosophie,” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 261-263. ↩

  9. Max Horkheimer, “Solidarität” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 264-265. ↩

  10. Max Horkheimer “Theorie des Verbrechers,” in MHGS, Bd. 12, 266-77. We have recently discovered some archival evidence that this suggests this particular fragment dates to 1943, see Max Horkheimer to Otto Kirchheimer, February 9 1943, MHA Na 1 532, [38] 315r. ↩

  11. Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932) 58. [link] ↩

  12. Vgl. Briffault, The Mothers, Volume II (New York, 1927), 357. ↩

  13. [Tr. note:] ‘Hands’ in a dual sense: The ‘hands’ of the lord in the sense of his servants, but also in that his servants are members of his extended body, if we follow Horkheimer’s argumentation. ↩

  14. [Tr. note:] Again, a double sense: ‘Member’ in the sense of a participant and ‘member’ in the sense of a limb. ↩

  15. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen. Ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc., 1949), 142-143. [link] ↩

  16. Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community (Boston, 1938) 190. [link] ↩

  17. Bernard Mandeville: “As Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players, / Pick-Pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers, / And all those, that, in Enmity / With down-right Working, cunningly / Convert to their own Use the Labour / Of their good-natur’d heedless Neighbor. / These were called Knaves; but, bar the Name, / The grave Industrious were the Same. / All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.” in The Fable of the Bees. Edited and with an introduction by Phillip Harth (Penguin Books, 1970), 64. [link] ↩

  18. Marx: “The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of bank-notes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? Would the microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary commerce (see Babbage) but for trading frauds? Does not practical chemistry owe just as much to the adulteration of commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest zeal for production? Crime, through its ever new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines. … In his Fable of the Bees (1705) Mandeville had already shown that every possible kind of occupation is productive, and had given expression to the tendency of this whole line of argument: “That what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us Sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without exception; there we must look for the true origin of all Arts and Sciences; and the moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled if not totally destroyed.” Only Mandeville was of course infinitely bolder and more honest than the philistine apologists of bourgeois society.” Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 30: Marx 1861-63. (Lawrence & Wishart [Electronic Book], 2010), 306-310. [link] ↩

  19. Arden of Feversham, Ed. Rev. Ronald Bayne (J. M. Dent & Co. Aldine House, [1592] 1897) [link] ↩

  20. John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, eds. Edgar V. Roberts and Edward Smith (University of Nebraska Press, [1728] 1969). [link] ↩

  21. “Yes, sir, we dare to do it; but, were my consent to give again, we would not do it under ten pound more. I value every drop of my blood at a French crown. I have had ten pound to steal a dog, and we have no more here to kill a man; but that a bargain is a bargain, and so forth, you should do it yourself.” Arden of Feversham, 35. ↩

  22. Ibid., 31. ↩

  23. Typescript “Memorandum. Über Teile des Los Angeles Arbeitsprogramms, die von den Philosophen nicht durchgeführt werden können.” MHA Na 1 578, [1] 1r–[4] 4r. ↩

  24. Typescript, “Notizen zum Programm des Buches, 30.8.1942” in MHA Na 805, [180]-[181]. ↩

  25. English in original. ↩